Capturing the world's oldest things on film

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I thought this was interesting. A living llareta plant that's estimated to be around 3000 years old and other ancient living organisms included in the link.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/cultu ... n-film.php




WHAT'S the oldest living thing you can think of? Your 96-year-old gran or that craggy tree at the bottom of the garden? Whatever springs readily to mind, it probably won't be nearly as old as the organisms Rachel Sussman photographs.


Sussman has travelled the world capturing images like this picture of a llareta plant in the Atacama desert in Chile. A relative of parsley, it looks like moss but actually consists of thousands of flowering buds on long stems which are so densely packed together they can withstand the weight of a human. Some parts of this particular specimen are thought to be more than 3000 years old, though we don't know enough about the plant to estimate its lifespan.

Sussman has only one criterion for her subjects - they must be older than 2000 years. Having found a suitable candidate, usually via word of mouth or internet research, she tracks down biologists studying it. Sometimes this is easy, but often there is not much scientific interest in that species, in which case she relies on local knowledge to get an estimate of the specimen's age.

Sussman's first subject was the Jomon Sugi, a Cryptomeria tree on Yakushima Island, Japan. Legend has it that the tree is 7000 years old, but Sussman has found carbon-dating studies indicating it is a mere 2200 years old. The oldest thing she has photographed are Actinobacteria from Siberia that DNA analysis has put at between 400,000 and 600,000 years old.

Many of Sussman's curiosities have one thing in common: they are found in extreme environments and are uniquely adapted to their habitat. They also tend to be very slow-growing. A prime example is the bristlecone pine. "This looks half dead most of the time, perhaps with just one branch that appears to be alive," says Sussman. "It shuts down all its non-essential processes."

As for the llareta, its biggest threat is humans - local people use it as fuel and to make medicine.

Interesting article. Curious looking plant... and it's even older than me!

I envy that living llareta plant.

The life span of a human is a great deal shorter than so many living organisms.

25,000 to 30,000 days if you take good care of yourself and don't get killed in an accident.

ruveyn

I actually saw a Welwitschia mirabilis in Namibia. It wasn't flowering but I would have been exceptionally lucky to catch that.

These videos aren't exactly about million-year-old plants but they're still very interesting.

Photographic Milestones
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOkd8ObhN_M&NR=1[/youtube]

World's Earliest Known Voice Recording
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkkK7a_ePAU&NR=1[/youtube]

The phonoautograph was an interesting precurser to acoustic phonographic recording. The audio recording, a verse of "Au Clair de la Lune" sung by a woman, was made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Scott was a Parisian typesetter and inventor who invented the phonoautograph, and died thinking Edison stole his idea for recording sound (just like he stole and ran Méliès out of the movie business). It is thought by some that when Scott visited the Whitehouse that he also recorded Abe Lincoln, but nobody has been able to unearth the phonoautograph scroll with Honest Abe's voice on it. A pity, as we must rely on historian's SWAG that Lincoln had a "high, tinny country twang of a voice."